This is a good question, and goes to the very heart of research no matter what field it is in. The language arts, history, science...the question of what makes a fact "significant" and how to know if that fact is true or not is essential for anyone studying no matter what the subject is.
The first part of the question is "what makes a fact significant." "Significant" is another way of saying "important," or "worthy of noticing." What is important in a given subject depends on what you are looking for. In your question you state that you are writing about a particular author and are trying to find facts about that author's life that are "significant." The key part here is that you are writing about an author. What kinds of things might have happened in a particular author's life that made them choose to become a writer in the first place, or influenced the types of stories that they would later create? Those are the types of events in a writer's life that would be "significant" as opposed to just being true.
For example, at a young age Stephen King found an old trunk in a relative's attic that contained tons of old EC horror comics and science fiction digests that had belonged to his father. He read them voraciously, and this "discovery" of a trunk helped lead him down the path of becoming a writer of supernatural and horror fiction. Thus, this fact would be labeled as "significant." The fact that Stephen King lived in a trailer when he was first married would not. It has nothing to do with his writing or why he writes in the horror field (though an interesting side note would be that this face might be significant to someone researching, say, the effects of poverty on writing style.)
The second part of your question is about how to know if a particular fact is true. This is a little harder. How do we know anything is true? The answer to this is: watch your sources. If you are getting your information from a reliable source than it is probably true. What makes a source reliable? That's the million dollar question.
Would your neighbor be a good source of information about you? How accurate would his description of you be? On the other hand, how much closer to a true description would your mother be able to give? My point is, the closer the source is to the question asked the more likely the information is going to be valid. Using our Stephen King example, his website could probably be counted on to provide accurate information.
Other trusted sources are newspapers, encyclopedias, and scholarly essays. Though not always accurate, these sources are often our best bets for checking the facts on things. There is also the good old fashioned "trip down to the library."
What to avoid? Maybe places like websites that look like they are not well constructed, or people whose writing is full of opinions and praise (or criticism.) These sources may be biased and may not be presenting both sides of the facts. Think of it as comparing the National Enquirer to the New York Times. They are both in print and at the store, but only one is actually trustworthy.
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